Foto: Marco Borggreve

JULIAN PRÉGARDIEN, tenor

Born in Frankfurt in 1984, tenor Julian Prégardien was trained in the choirs of Limburg Cathedral. After having studied voice in Freiburg and at the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival Academy, he was a member of the soloist ensemble of Frankfurt Opera from 2009 to 2013. In parallel, he developed an international solo career, collaborating particularly often with conductors specialized in historical performance practice. 2008 marked his first collaboration with René Jacobs, his participation in a widely hailed recording of Bach’s St John Passion with La Chapelle Rhénane, and his début performances at the Theater an der Wien (in Gluck’s Ezio) and at Opéra de Monte Carlo (in Haydn‘s L'infedeltà delusa). His first Lieder recitals took place as a member of the “Young Elite” at Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, as one of the “Jeunes Étoiles” at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, and at Rheingau Music Festival. In 2010 he went on European tour as soloist with Collegium Vocale Gent and Concerto Köln in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

In the meantime, Prégardien has become one of the outstanding young vocalists on the international scene. In recent years he gave his début at Aix-en-Provence Festival, at Hamburg State Opera, at Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Salzburg Festival has been regularly inviting for concert appearances since 2015; now he will give his first stage performance in Salzburg in 2018 as Narraboth in Richard Strauss’s Salome, staged by Romeo Castellucci, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Franz Welser-Möst.

Kent Nagano regularly invites Prégardien to perform with the two orchestras of which he is Music Director: Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Hamburg State Opera. Sharing the stage with his father Christoph Prégardien, Julian also sang the title role in a concert performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo with the ensemble Concerto Köln, likewise with Nagano conducting.

Julian Prégardien has collaborated with René Jacobs and with Christophe Rousset in a great number of projects featuring opera and concert repertoire of the Baroque and Classical eras, including works by Lully, Charpentier, Rameau, Carissimi, Pergolesi, Bach, and Mozart.

He has sung the role of the Evangelist in widely hailed recordings of Bach’s St John Passion and St. Matthew Passion with the Bavarian Radio Choir and Concerto Köln; in 2018 he will go on tour with Basel Chamber Orchestra in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio; then, in 2019, he will sing the St. Matthew Passion with the Bach Collegium Japan. Prégardien will teach a master class in November 2018 on the subject of the St John Passion in collaboration with McGill University, the Montreal Bach Festival, the Université de Montréal, and the Conservatoire de Musique.

In his career, Julian Prégardien lays particular emphasis on Lied recitals along with chamber music projects. He was one of the vocalists selected to participate in the complete performance of the Lieder of Franz Schubert at the Schubertiade in Hohenems and Schwarzenberg (Austria), at Wigmore Hall, and at the new Boulez Hall in Berlin. Along with this father and the early music ensemble Anima Eterna conducted by Jos van Immerseel, he conceived a special Monteverdi recital featuring excerpts from the operas Ulisse and Orfeo along with madrigals: the programme was featured at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, at Dresden Music Festival and at Versailles Castle.

Prégardien has launched the media platform P.RHÉI, a multimedia editorial project that throws new light on the performance history and practice of Schubert’s Winterreise. The project includes a recording of Hans Zender’s orchestral version of Winterreise, to be released on the Alpha Classics label in 2018.

In November 2017, Julian Prégardien was appointed Professor of Voice at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. He is a member of the Schumann Network and a patron of Canto elementar, a programme that actively supports children’s singing activities in Kindergärten.

“Julian Prégardien, the evening’s true revelation, incarnates a Tamino close to the ideal. The son of a renowned tenor, Prégardien brings his extensive experience in oratorio and lied to the role, for an admirable result in terms of delicacy, phrasing and quasi-whispered emotional declamation, while never lacking magnificent energy and clear projection in the role’s pivotal moments. Thus, in the two solo arias, Prégardien’s interpretation already bears the mark of the great tenors – particularly the first one, full of exquisite tenderness that gradually turns into irrepressible passion. But the “Speaker Scene” in front of the Temple is where Prégardien’s Tamino reveals himself in all his splendor, heroic and self-confident; we are therefore already looking forward to what will surely be a magnificent performance in his upcoming incarnation of Oberon in Munich. This is an artist whose path we should watch closely, since he promises to enjoy a brilliant career.” (04 April 2017, www.classiquenews.com >>)

“Julian Prégardien does not just ‘deliver’ a Lieder recital. Along with the no less inventive and sensitive pianist Michael Gees, he takes his audience on a thrilling, thoroughly satisfying journey, which he lives with every fibre of his body and colours with every nuance of his finely timbred tenor voice. […] Prégardien also takes the time to slow down the tempo in order to radiantly savour the ‘outburst of the heart, filled with old dreams’. In the role of a ‘kind spirit’, he re-animates songs of a long-gone era by adding adornments and trills, as if performing a brief operatic aria: then, at the end of Clara Schumann’s version of ‘Loreley’, he adds a mocking, effective ‘Lalalala’ that is not in the score. [...]

It would be hard to remember any other Lieder recital featuring the same degree of emotional and musical breadth: here, Prégardien even brings the once popular genre of melodrama for spoken voice and piano accompaniment back to life.”